Past exhibition · Current Arts Gallery
Samuel Abelow
Say To Wisdom, Thou Art My Sister
On view
September 3 – 9, 2026
Opening reception
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Current Arts Gallery
17 Essex Street
New York, NY 10002
Exhibition catalog.
About the exhibition
Say To Wisdom, Thou Art My Sister is a series of vase and face paintings. The vases take their titles from the literal meanings of women's names, each a meditation on a quality of the psyche: Tranquility, Wisdom, Song. The face paintings portray the relationship between spiritual master and student.
"I understand painting as a conversation: a vertical conversation between myself and God, and a horizontal conversation between myself and community. The question underneath the work is simple: what is happening now, and how can I engage with it in the most real and transparent way?"
Samuel Abelow, Director at Current Arts
From the exhibition
About the artist
Samuel Abelow (b. 1991, New York City) is a Brooklyn-based painter raised in Connecticut. He studied at the Sonic Arts Center of the City College of New York.
His practice moves between Fragments and Narrative Paintings. The Narrative works often include figures, symbolic elements, biblical motifs, stories, and myths, while the Fragments may appear abstract but are often representations of waves, branches, or pieces extracted from larger narrative images. Paint itself, oil, pigment, dirt, debris, becomes part of the investigation.
His work has been exhibited in institutional and gallery contexts, including the solo exhibition The Orphic Dance & Persephone's Eyes of Water, curated by Timothy Hull at St. Thomas Aquinas College (2019); OCEAN at Ezra Gallery (2025), which he curated; and Jewish Consciousness at Maor Gallery (2026). His paintings are held in private collections in New York, East Hampton, Los Angeles and Berlin.